【Her · The Bride-to-Be】
The afternoon I came back, mist rose off the river and steeped the whole water town in a lukewarm haze. I stood at the door of the old house dragging my suitcase, my heels on the damp bluestone, my mind entirely on what lay ten days ahead—the white veil, the ring, the always warm and steady strength in his hand when he held mine. I had come back to tie up loose ends, to spend these last few days as an unmarried girl cleanly, so I could be married off clean. In my heart I had even bid farewell, one by one, to this town, to every one of its dripping-wet lanes.
I thought the hardest part of this trip home would only be the reluctance to leave. Reluctance to leave the old clay pot on my mother’s stove, reluctance to leave the osmanthus tree in the back courtyard that dropped a headful of blossoms on me every year. I hadn’t reckoned that the hardest part was leaning against that mottled wall at the mouth of the lane, arms folded, watching, motionless, as I drew near. He had a cigarette between his lips, unlit, just held there, but his eyes had already, a step ahead of me, measured me from head to toe.
It was Lu Zhixing. My fiancé’s childhood friend—the two of them thick as thieves since diaper days, the kind of bond where each family put the other in the seat of honor at every celebration. In these years he’d gone out into the world, done some business no one could quite name, and come back wearing a different skin—a dark shirt in an expensive cut, cuffs loosely rolled to the forearm, and on the wrist he bared was a heavy watch, the wrist bone rising and falling as he moved. He stood there like the one thing in this old lane that belonged somewhere else.
He looked at me the same old way, a way I’d already learned firsthand in my teens: the gaze doesn’t land on the face, it lands first on the collarbone, then slides down, unhurriedly taking my measure from head to foot, until my skin drew tight and my back went numb. Others could see nothing in it, only I knew where that gaze landed—because it always landed on the places I least wanted seen, landing steady and heavy, like a temperatureless hand feeling me first through my clothes.
“The bride’s home,” he said first, his voice lower and slower than in memory, the last syllable dragging out lazily. “Heard it’s just these next few days now.” I nodded and instinctively stepped back half a pace, keeping the courteous, distant space a woman already betrothed ought to keep. I gripped the handle of my suitcase tighter, knuckles gone white, as if that cold metal rod were the only shred of dignity I could hold on to just then.
But he wouldn’t take that distance. He only smiled, smiled until his eyes narrowed, showing a trace of the boy he’d once been, and something more than that trace besides: “Then it’s perfect timing. Before you go, come to my place for a jar of wine. I’ve got a jar of nü’er hong in my cellar that got buried the year you left—it was meant to be opened the day you married. Now that you’re not marrying me—” he paused, taking that half a cigarette, still unlit, from his lips, “—this wine can’t just rot in the cellar.”
The words were half true, half not, a needle wrapped in silk, every line stepping on the softest spot in my heart. I opened my mouth, wanting to say these days were busy, wanting to say it wasn’t convenient, wanting to say anything at all—but the mist thickened, a foghorn on the river gave a muffled blast, and I heard myself say, as if driven by some devil: all right, just one jar. The moment I said it I regretted it. But that scrap of regret was quietly, soundlessly pressed down by another thing in my heart I wouldn’t let myself look at too closely.
【Lu Zhixing · The Childhood Friend】
I waited for this day for many years. That’s no exaggeration—from back when she was still a girl in a ponytail, from the first time I noticed the way those two soft mounds on her chest trembled when she ran, I’d made up my mind: sooner or later I would get this woman. Pity fate shoved her at my honest, plodding brother first. I accept it. I wait. I’m a man with no other talent but patience, a hunter’s patience, and I waited a good few years.
I know exactly how women like her work: the more prim, the more tightly wrapped up, unwilling to bare even an inch of collarbone, the fiercer the breath burns inside, the more they’re waiting for someone to come pry off that shell. My brother can’t pry it off. He’ll never pry it off, not in his whole life. All he knows is to cherish her, to keep her, to keep her like some Guanyin who doesn’t breathe and doesn’t run wet, set up in a shrine to be worshiped day after day. But women aren’t made to be worshiped.
So the moment I heard she was back and the wedding right at hand, I didn’t hesitate one bit. This is the last window. Once she crosses that threshold she’s another man’s lawfully wedded wife, and the flavor changes, thins out, and there’s no more of the fire that today’s taboo can set blazing. This is exactly what I want—the last ten days, another man’s bride, before she puts on the white veil, before the veil comes down, to make her open her mouth once, beneath me, for me alone.
That jar of wine is real; I stored it away for her years ago, and I smeared the seal-mud on with my own hands. The old feeling is real too, only I never once meant to let it stop at the word “old.” When she agreed to come, her eyes dodged to the side for a second, but her feet didn’t dodge, her body didn’t lean back. In that one dodge and one non-dodge, I’d already seen everything that would come after, scene by scene, laid out clear. A woman’s mouth will lie. Her feet won’t.
That place of mine was set aside on purpose for this day: the top floor of a building on the town’s edge, the whole floor mine. Below I’d carved out a fair-sized wine cellar, and further in there was a room I never mention to outsiders—the lights can be dialed notch by notch into a warm red, and the things hung on the walls, kept in the cabinets, are the kind that anyone in the know grasps at a glance while anyone who isn’t couldn’t say what they’re for if they looked. I don’t plan to frighten her right off the bat. A woman is a thing you have to let breathe like an old wine, letting her soften layer by layer on her own; you can’t rush it.
I lifted that jar of nü’er hong out from the very back, wiped my palm over the years-old seal-mud at its mouth, and reckoned in my mind the figure she’d filled out elsewhere in these years. A woman raised on the water and soil of the south is at her lushest at this about-to-marry, not-yet-married age—the waist still slender, but the breasts and hips ripened to a full, plump readiness. I wanted to see with my own eyes whether it was just as I’d pictured it a countless number of times in my dreams these years: long since ripened through, waiting only for a hand to pluck it.
【Her · The Bride-to-Be】
That building of his is on the town’s edge, open and empty all around; the elevator ran straight up to the very top and not a single person got on the whole way. The moment the door opened, I learned what it meant to find a hidden world. The whole floor was warm-toned light dialed very low, and beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows was the river, half-hidden in mist, with a fisherman’s lamp or two far off. The cellar door stood half open, and out of it drifted the tipsy scent of years-old oak barrels mixed with wine dregs; before a drop was drunk, one was already three parts drunk.
The truth is the string inside me had been taut the whole time. As I stepped in I’d marked out the line for myself: finish this jar, say a few dignified pleasantries, thank him for the thought, then leave, go back to my mother’s house, treat the whole trip as nothing more than a courtesy paid. But the place was too quiet, quiet enough to hear my own heartbeat, quiet enough that all the noisy, normal, bride-to-be’s worries of the daytime retreated, one by one, to somewhere very, very far, retreating into a blurred background.
He poured my wine, poured it full, so full the surface bulged trembling above the rim of the cup. That wine, buried all these years, went down soft and sweet, like old time dissolving on the tongue, but the kick came up terribly fast. Before we’d drunk even half the jar my face was burning, the roots of my ears burning too, my fingertips gone soft, so that I could barely hold the cup steady. I knew I should stop, but he refilled it for me cup after cup, that hand very steady, and I too, somehow, took it cup after cup.
He wasn’t in a hurry to touch me, only talked with me about the old days. Talked about the year I was sixteen and sprained my ankle by the river, and how he’d carried me on his back the full two streets home; talked about how back then there was a line he’d held choked in his throat, wanting to say it to me, only I’d taken up with someone else too fast, so that line rotted in his belly. Most of these old things I’d forgotten, or rather, I’d never dared let myself remember them. Now, lifted up one by one and set before me again, they suddenly all took on another kind of scalding weight, pressing on me till I couldn’t breathe.
The alcohol wrapped me up dizzy and warm, my four limbs no longer feeling like my own. The me in my heart who was to be a bride tomorrow was still weakly urging: get up, take your leave, go. But I sat there, not moving a muscle. I couldn’t even sense from which cup of wine, which old memory, the dignified space that should have stood between us began, inch by inch, to vanish. By the time I came to, his knee was already about to touch mine.
He suddenly reached out and tucked back a stray lock of hair that had slid to my cheek. The motion was light, natural, the sort of thing that boy who carried me by the river years ago might have done. But after the pad of his finger finished tucking the hair, it didn’t withdraw; instead it paused for an instant on that thinnest skin behind my ear, just an instant, and my whole self went rigid. Not because it was unfamiliar—precisely because it wasn’t. The thing hidden in that one touch, I’d felt it faintly, vaguely, in my teens, only back then I didn’t understand it; now I did.
I should have dodged. Around my neck still hung the fine chain my fiancé had fastened on me with his own hands, the pendant lying right against my chest as it rose and fell just then; in the little bag I carried was still the wedding-day schedule, folded up neat and square. All of this I remembered perfectly clearly. But sitting there in that warm red light, a jar of old wine burning my stomach, an old love burning my heart, I found my body far more honest than this mouth of mine, this head of mine—his fingertip merely slid slowly from behind my ear to the side of my neck, and my breathing went ragged first; the two mounds of soft flesh on my chest, baked hot and swollen by the wine, beyond my control stood up erect through the thin single layer of my shirt, even the nipples hardening in the dark into two risen points. That last door in my heart, the one about to close, was pried open again by this one weightless touch into a single crack, and the wind coming through that crack was scalding hot.